SavvyBlog

Topic —  From the Publisher's Desk,

Laptop Leisure

August 22, 2007
Sarah Morgenstern

I just got back from three weeks off, away with my family visiting our extended families out west. It was great—lots of eating and drinking and visiting and fresh air and reading fiction. And not sitting at a desk for three weeks was a nice treat. In fact, I have never taken three weeks off in a row before but it wasn’t hard to get used to!

Now being a mom entrepreneur means you can do that—take some time off whenever you want—but it also means that you really can’t ever disconnect from the biz…so I brought my laptop along and except for a few high-speed internet/wireless free days (very novel I must say!) at the in-laws I did stay caught up with my email. There’s two schools of thought on the vacation email backlog I have discovered—the ‘don’t read any until you get back and then deal with the pile’ school or the ‘clean it out along the way’ school where you keep pretty caught up while on vacation.

I used to be firmly in the former school back in the day when I worked at a big company and there were lots of other people to fill in for me when I was away but nonetheless the stress of returning to that full email box was always pretty bad. This trip I tried the latter approach and it was surprisingly much better—dealing with the email in a controlled manner everyday (I read for an hour in the morning before my kids woke up and an hour at the end of the day when we returned from hiking or whatever fun we had) made my reentry back to work this week so much more manageable and allowed me to keep that vacation feeling a little longer than usual.

I get about 1300 emails a week—times that by 3 weeks and you’re close to 4000 emails…I think it was the right way to go!